Infinite Corridor
by Lady LYN- Beatrice
Summary: Time is not like a corridor, continuing forever into the future without branching or ending. It is a maze, branching endlessly into a thicket of horrifying complexity, which will require all Orihime's cleverness and willpower to escape. Rating will go up.
1. Prologue

Author's note: Okay. I want to make this clear: this is not going to be a _nice_ story. When I rate a story 'M' (and the rating will go up once it becomes necessary, _which it will_) and use the 'Horror' category, _I am not joking_. Orihime is going to screw up, and those failures will have consequences. Very nasty consequences, in some cases. You have been warned.

Infinite Corridor

Prologue

Orihime opened her eyes in her own bed at home. Normally, this would not be remarkable. Normally, she would not have thought twice about circumstances like this. Normally, however, circumstances like this actually _were_ as unremarkable as they seem to be from this description, which fails to take into account previous events.

To be specific, this description fails to take into account that when Orihime last closed her eyes, she had been dying.

Unsurprisingly, she panicked. "Shun'o! Ayame! Baigon! Hinagiku! Lily! Tsubaki! What happened? Why am I at home? Is everyone else okay?" Orihime sat up and, to her surprise, short hair brushed against her jaw. "Why is my-"

Since she was most _sincerely_ not expecting _that_, she glanced over herself once, quickly, to check for any more surprises. What she found was... not what she expected.

Somehow, she had regressed six years in age. Orihime was nine again, or at least looked it.

"What... happened to me...?" She was understandably terrified. After all, Orihime didn't understand what was happening. She didn't know why she was here, how she had survived, or what had, for lack of a better word, shrunk her.

And then... something smacked her on the head?

Tsubaki's shouting was almost comforting. At least it was familiar. At least she hadn't just dreamed the last six years.

"Isn't this what you wanted? You said it! 'I wish I could turn back time and fix everything.' That's what you said, isn't it? Don't waste the chance we gave you! If you just sit here and cry, everything will turn out just like that!"

"Ah-" Orihime interrupted him, "does that mean what I saw was real?"

"It happened, if that's what you mean. Just like the injuries you heal still happened. That future will still exist if you make the same choices that led to it originally, but if you change things the future will also change. No one else remembers because no one else was involved when you turned back time, so their actions will most likely stay the same unless you influence them in some way. Understand?" Shun'o raised her voice to explain over Tsubaki's lecture.

"Yes, I think I understand." Orihime nodded and got out of bed. "...my hairpins are missing."

Shun'o paused, "...you haven't been given them yet. Sora currently has them."

Orihime's eyes widened, "Sora's still alive? Can I save him?"

"It's not impossible, but it will be hard. And since you don't have our vessel or the reiki to use it, we can't help you."

"He'll give me the pins the day he's supposed to die. Can I build up my reiki before then? What day is it?" Orihime was wearing an uncharacteristically serious face. It was vaguely disconcerting to see an expression like that on a nine-year-old.

"I don't know. I'm sorry, Orihime, but this is uncharted territory. Even we didn't expect anything like this to happen." Shun'o shook her head. "The best way to find out is probably to just ask or find a calendar somewhere. I'm not sure about your reiki, but if we got Urahara-san involved..." She trailed off, thinking.

Orihime nodded. "It's not much, but it's a plan. I'll find Urahara-san and tell him what happened. He'll probably be able to help."

Orihime's first loop was a disaster. Urahara didn't believe her until her predictions started coming true. By that time, Sora was already dead, despite Orihime's efforts to the contrary. Her reiki didn't evolve much faster than it had in the original timeline, and though she managed to help Rukia keep order in Karakura, Ichigo never became a Shinigami for some reason, and her other classmates either never awakened (Sado), weren't much help (Ishida), or were dead (Rukia). Aizen steamrolled right over the city without much resistance. After Aizen's victory, Orihime reset the world with a heavy heart.

It took a few loops for Orihime to reach the conclusion she did. ' Nothing changes unless I change it.'

It took longer for her to realize what it meant. ' I'm on my own. Nobody else can remember the futures I erase. And nobody will believe me just on my word, and convincing them always takes too long. If I want things to be different I have to make those changes myself.' (The second conclusion required no small amount of prompting from Tsubaki.)

It took another loop for her to get over the mental breakdown from that revelation. Still, Orihime was a fairly resilient girl, all things considered, and, while 'she got over it' is really not the way to describe the end of that event at all, she managed to at least get back to 'functional'.

And so Orihime woke once again in her own bed, in her own home, right back where- and when- she started. It is at this point that the story proper begins.


	2. Chapter 1

Oops! Sorry, guys! It seems I was using the wrong term for 'spiritual power' in this 'verse. The correct term is 'reiryoku', which I will use from now on. My apologies.

Infinite Corridor

Ch 1: Heat Haze

Orihime woke in her bed on June 10th, at about 8:30 in the morning, and immediately got to work. Even though there was at least a month before things really started to happen, there was still no time to waste.

First, she wrote down everything she had learned about the timeline. This currently only filled three pages (and a small part of a fourth) in one of her school notebooks, but she would learn more this loop and add it in the next. At this point, every event was a learning experience.

Next, she came up with a schedule for the next month, until Sora's death on July 6th. The first week was spent mostly following Ichigo around, trying to increase her child form's tolerance for reiki. Since reiki was an attribute of the spirit, not the body, she kept her reserves every time she reset time. But, unfortunately for Orihime, reiryoku also had a physical component called reiatsu. Also unfortunately, resistance to reiatsu _was_, to a degree, a physical attribute. If Orihime didn't want to end up hampered by her own increased reiatsu, she had to spend some time around people with a lot of it. Ichigo was the obvious choice.

The second week was time for her to study on her own (sort of) with the Shun Shun Rikka, getting back "old" skills before she had to demonstrate them. She would also use this time to attempt to develop new abilities, though she wasn't feeling very hopeful about the likelihood of success in that particular endeavor.

The third week and the remaining six days after that would be spent convincing Urahara to train her and getting any help she could from him. She wasn't sure if her would quite know what to do with her, since in the original time line and every other subsequent one he had seemed rather perplexed about her existence (more so when she had appeared _before_ Ichigo became a Shinigami), but she had nothing to lose by asking him for training before she tried to follow Sora and save him or, failing that, figure out why she wasn't able to do so. Orihime had already learned that Sora wouldn't stay home with her for any reason that day, so she had decided to do things a little differently this time.

But everyone knows that saying about mice and men and plans...

* Orihime's POV *

9

"Hey, Urahara-san. Will you help me train?"

24

"Hey, Urahara-san. I need some help perfecting an ability I'm working on."

38

"Hey, Urahara-san. Will you help me figure out how this ability works? Nobody else can figure out how it does what it does."

42

"Inoue?" Urahara turns to me for a moment.

"Yes?" I answer him without pretense, using an adult's tone of voice and word choice. _I think he'll be insulted if I acted like a kid while asking him for help. Better be truthful._

"Just how old _are_ you, Inoue? You're not nine years old. You don't act it when you're not around people you know." He looks at me like I'm some great mystery, and it brings a rather mirthless smile to my face.

Then I sigh and answer him, "Older than you think. I'm not sure of the exact year- I haven't exactly kept count- but I'm somewhere around two hundred years old, mentally speaking. I'll just go ahead and assume you want the full story, then?"

"If it's not too much trouble." He's wearing that creepy grin again.

"I wasn't lying about _who_ I am. My name really is Inoue Orihime, and everything I told you is true... for a certain value of 'true'. When I was fifteen, I met a new classmate who seemed unusually familiar to one of my friends. That girl's name was Kuchiki Rukia." I paused a moment so he could process this.

"The person she knew was my friend Kurosaki Ichigo. I'm sure you recognize the name. Rukia had been seriously injured in a confrontation with a hollow that had come to attack Ichigo..."

"So," Urahara said, "you reversed time with your Shun Shun Rikka to try to change the outcome of the Winter War?"

I nodded, "But it will be several weeks before Sora gives me my hairpins. I want to train myself to the point where I no longer need them, ideally, but right now I just need to be able to use them when I get them. You were always our ally before- or should that be after- or befafter? Aftfore? What do you call something that happened already but it hasn't happened yet?"

"Never mind that now," said Urahara, "If we have as little time as you say we should get started."

It was miserable work, but it paid off. By the time Sora gave me my hairpins, I had enough resistance to my own reiryoku to use them without passing out. It was now time for Desperate Measures.

When Sora tried to leave, I placed a shield over the door.

"Sora," I said, "please listen to me. If you leave, _you are going to die_. I'm not joking. Please don't do this."

For the first time, something went right. Sora listened to me.

"Hi," I introduced myself, "I'm Inoue Orihime."

Tatsuki grinned at me. "Arisawa Tatsuki. Nice to meet you." Tatsuki didn't always end up fighting, but it happened often enough- and her personality was belligerent enough- that befriending her wasn't dangerous enough for me to expend the effort of getting her to leave me alone. Besides, the company was nice. Not everyone was willing to put up with my many oddities, and of those I got along with Tatsuki the best.

The time I spent with her was the most peaceful I knew in most loops, and out of all the people I knew, she was one of the most reliable when she helped us. Not the most frequent, but the most reliable.

*Third Person POV*

Orihime was doing math homework when it hit her.

"So if the shortest length between two... points... That's it! Hey, Shun'o! Tsubaki! Everyone!"

"Yes, Orihime? What is it?" Shun'o asked, voicing the question for all of them.

"I figured it out! My high-speed technique, I mean. Just... Look, the shortest distance between points is a straight line, right? But my ability is to reject things, right? So I just reject 'the distance between the points', like folding a piece of paper so the points are right next to each other instead of walking along the edge!"

Everyone took a moment to process that.

"It... might work. Theoretically, if we get it right, you would just show up at the second point. More like teleportation than high-speed movement."

It took a lot of tries over several loops to perfect, but perfect it they did. Orihime could teleport to nearly any location she could see, within certain limits.

This came in handy when she couldn't let her opponent touch her. Like, say, right now.

"I really don't want to hurt you! Why won't you listen to me just for a moment?"

In lieu of a verbal response, Kira took another swing at her. Orihime groaned inwardly and flickered out of the way. _There really is no point in talking to him, is there? He won't listen no matter what I do._

_ On the other hand, if I attack him, he'll definitely die. How can I disable him without seriously hurting or killing him?_

The answer came when she next popped out of Kira's swing. The outer wall of Seireitei was in sight, and maybe...

"Santen Kesshun!" Orihime changed tactics, producing her shield. She then slammed it into Kira and warped the space around _him_, knocking him into the outer wall and holding him there. Eventually, the constant pressure forced the air from his lungs long enough for him to pass out, and Orihime could pass without having to worry. Someone would probably be along and find him soon.

For now, she had a friend to save and an enemy to (hopefully) thwart.


End file.
